Date: Mon, 1 Mar 1999 11:55:52 EST
From: "Barbara J. Harris"
Subject: [WRITERS] INT: Inspiration! (Haven for Hopeful Renaissants)
NOTE: This thread is open to anyone who'd like to provide inspiration for
would-be Spring Fiesta Contestants... informational posts, quotes, or just
rambles about any of the contest themes will be welcome!
Barbara, totally fed up with the winter doldrums after snow, slush, rain, and
more snow, had paced the corridors of the newly renovated Haven for Hopeful
Renaissants until her ankles ached. She decided it was high time to wake
Hagatha and Bunny, who had been hibernating far too long. First she went up
to the top floor of the Octagonal Tower, opened the glass doors to the
Observation Deck, and shook Bunny until her teeth rattled.
"Wha... what is it?" asked a grumpy voice. Bunny felt a cold draft and
snuggled back down under the new stardusted indigo comforter.
"Come onnnn, Bunny, wake up! We're having a Spring Fiesta Contest, and I
need your help inspiring people!"
"It doesn't feel like Spring... that's SNOW blowing through the window!
Close it up! Go wake up Hagatha and leave me alone! Come back when it's
warrrrmm outside!" Bunny rolled over and went back to sleep. Barbara sighed,
closed the window, and traipsed morosely back down the cirular staircase to
her Writing Room.
She considered trying Hagatha in the Holosuite, but thought better of it.
She'd probably just get into mischief if she was as disgruntled as Bunny. You
never knew what even a Good Witch would do if she was wakened out of
hibernation too soon.
Instead, Barbara sat down and checked her e-mail. Ah!!! One prospective
contestant had written claiming she'd kept her up all night plotting! Yay!
Music to her ears... now... lessee... what else can we use to inspire?
Leafing through Barbara G. Walker's _The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and
Secrets_, she found an entry on reincarnation, which might be useful in either
of the Renaissance categories, or even for the Earth Day Essay...
REINCARNATION: Literally, "re-fleshing," the basic Oriental view of cyclic
rebirth after each death; the original meaning of being born again. In the
role of Fate-goddess, the Great Mother governed the Wheel of Becoming (Greek
*kyklos geneseon*) which meant the cycles of successive lives, like the wheel
of karma governed by Kali.
Patriarchal thinkers tended to deny the doctrine of reincarnation in favor of
the one-way trip to heaven or hell after only one life on earth. They sought
eternal stasis rather than cycles. Yet reincarnation was the standard belief
of all the ancient nations, with the patriarchal principle of eternal stasis
apparing only as a late development.
Pythagoras believed in transmigration of souls from one body to another: "The
spirit wanders, comes now here, now there, and occupies whatever frame it
pleases. From beasts it passes into human bodies, and from our bodies into
beasts, but never perishes." Plato had the same idea. His *Republic*
depicted Greek heroes in the underworld choosing bodies for their next
incarnation on earth. The rebirth doctrine prevailed among cultured Greeks
who had been initiated into the promised free choice of subsequent bodies to
the Enlightened Ones in the Intermediate State between death and the next
life.
Even Jewish tradition retained traces of the reincarnation doctrine. In the
"First Book of Adam and Eve," Adam offered God a sacrifice of his own blood,
saying, "Be favorable to me every time I die, and bring me to life." Orthodox
Jews made it a rule not to name a newborn child after a living person, lest
untimely transmission of the name-soul should bring death to the elder. The
rule stemmed from the ancient belief that every infant possessed the soul of
an ancestor in a new body. The Jewish belief that a woman could conceive by
bathing in water used to wash a corpse clearly points to a belief in
reincarnation. Indeed, the Talmud says Adam was reincarnated in the person of
David, and then again in the Messiah.
Reincarnation was the general belief not only in the Orient but throughout
pagan Europe. Caesar said the druids taught this doctrine of cyclic rebirths.
It is still the prevailing opinion among "primitive" peoples who imagine their
own souls to be temporary bits of the World Soul that animates all living
things. The Poetic Edda demonstrates a belief in the karmic wheel of
reincarnations, from which one may be released only by self-destruction.
Brynhild's suicide insured that "born again she may never be." Among the
Eskimos as among ancient Greeks and Hindus, cycles of reincarnation include
all forms of life. They say the Goddess of Animals looks after all creatures
and doesn't like to see too many of them killed, since they are of the same
spiritual substance as human beings. "Life is endless," the shamans say,
"only we do not know in what form we shall reappear after death."
Reincarnation was necessarily bound up with motherhood in all societies,
since mothers were its agenst and carriers. It was the mother of
Lemminkainen, hero of the Kalevala, who gave him another life after he was
killed. In northern India, dead infants were buried under the threshold of
the house, so their spirits might enter the bodies of mothers who passed in
and out and so be born again.
Reincarnation seems to have been a secret tenet of some of the early
Christian churches, not explained to ordinary congregations but revealed in
secret after the preliminary stages of initiation into an iner group of
"elect" or "perfected" mystics. Later, the exoteric church repudiated the
doctrine of karmic rebirth. In 553 A. D. the Second Council of Constantinople
laid down a decree: "Whosoever shall support the mythical doctrine of the pre-
existence of the sould and the consequent wonderful opinion of its return, let
him be anathema." Origen, once accounted a saint and a father of the church,
taught the doctrine of reincarnation; but three centuries after his death he
was officially excommunicated "on account of his beliefs."
The concept of reincarnation made nonsense of the Christian doctrine of
reward and punishment after death. If all souls returned to the same Cauldron
of Regeneration, including animal souls mingling with human ones, logically
they were not differentiated for eternity into "evil" and "good" souls. The
West's traditional denial of soul-stuff to animals, and its insistenece that
man alone was immortal and stood at the pinnacle of all creation, led to
abuses contributing to the present-day ecological crisis. At a symposium of
theologians in California, 1970, "virtually all scholars agreed that the
traditional Christian attitude toward nature has given sanction to
exploitation of the environment by science and technology and thus contributed
to air and water pollution, overpopulation and other ecological threats."
Lynn White wrote: "One of the causes of our present crisis is to be found in
the Judeo-Christian traditions... which speak of man's dominance over
nature... By destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it possible to
exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects."
It is odd that even here, those living things with feelings are called
"objects."
Eastern opinions on reincarnation mitigated man's cruelty to his fellow
creatures, at the price of attributing to them a psychic content
indistinguishable from that of human beings. It is no great moral victory to
refrain from killing a spider if one sincerely believes the spider could
contain the soul of one's grandmother. It might be more moral to refrain from
killing a spider simply because it is alive, and wishes to remain so; and all
will to live deserves respect.
Perhaps the best one could say for reincarnation was that it was not
wasteful. Its soul-stuff was preserved and recycled. The Christian theory
was less tidy, with constant new creation of supposedly "immortal" souls,
since the world began: a vast accumulation, still increasing daily. In
practice, however, many Christian secretly believed in some form of the
forbidden reincarnation. Like Orphics, some even claimed they could remember
their former lives. The conspicuous absence of proof for such claims only
seems to strengthen the faith of those who wish to believe.
(From _The Women's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets_ by Barbara G. Walker.)
Love & Light, Barbara